Head Lice

Pediculus humanus capitis

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This week’s podcast is guaranteed to make your scalp crawl—but don’t worry, it’s most likely all in your head, and not on it. We’ll visit entomologist Richard Pollack to learn about an insect that’s the bane of parents and school principals everywhere—or is it? Ari Daniel Shapiro explains.

Photo Credit: Gilles San Martin, CC BY-SA

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Meet the Scientists

Head Lice Podcast: Meet the Scientist

Meet Entomologist Richard Pollack from our Head Lice Podcast:

Where do you work?

Well, that all depends on the day of the week and time of day. Here's the short list:

President & Chief Scientific Officer, IdentifyUS LLC
Visiting Researcher, Boston University
Instructor, Harvard School of Public Health
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Tufts University
Commissioner, Norfolk County Mosquito Control District Commission Chair
Mosquito Advisory Group, Massachusetts Dept of Agricultural Resources

What do you study?

As a public health entomologist, I explore the ecology, epidemiology, physiology and behavior of those insects and ticks that find us attractive.

What are three titles you would give yourself?

Entomologist, dead-pan stand up comic, realist.

What do you like to do when you are not working?

When not in the lab, you'll find me the field (or in painfully maddening never-ending bureaucratic meetings).

What do you like most about science?

It would be the same answer that most scientists would utter: What I do is intellectually stimulating. That's good, because the financial rewards seem inversely proportional to the cerebral ones. Furthermore, I can go anywhere in the world and find my little friends - much to the annoyance of family members accompanying me.

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Extras

Head Lice Podcast: Extras

Images

See images of Dr. Pollack at work in his former office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Ari’s NPR story from 2011.

View a slideshow of Head Lice Images from EOL.

Facts

Lice are in the order Phthiraptera, which contains some 5,000 species in four suborders.

The female louse attaches eggs, known as nits, to the shaft of human hair using a cement-like substance from her reproductive organ.

A louse cannot live by blood alone; most blood-sucking lice depend on symbiotic bacteria in their guts to provide vital nutrients.

The human pubic or crab louse is more closely related to the lice that live on gorillas than they are to the lice that colonize our own heads.

Completely unrelated to the lice that parasitize birds and mammals are the invertebrates known as Psocoptera, the barklice and booklice. Some feed on bark and lichen on trees; others are “bookworms,” pests of libraries large and small.

Explore:

View the Parasites of Humans collection on EOL.

Participate

Do you have a lousy specimen you’d like Dr. Pollack to identify? Snap a photo and submit it to his new company for identification, or share it via the EOL Flickr Group.